I have problems with people who abstained. The hard thing is, how do you change voter behavior?
Though I’m typically not a fan of deontological ethics, living in a deep red state, I afforded myself the opportunity to remain principled in a stand against genocide. If I lived in a swing state, however, I may have given more weight to a consequentialist perspective and made a different decision, though I would’ve hated myself for it.
I could say a lot more, but I wanna let you take this conversation where you want it to go, so that’s the core of my mindset behind that decision
I do respect your engagement with the realities of living in a deep red state. To me, that is cool and respectable.
Say you lived in Michigan or something. Assuming everything else was more or less the same, what information or circumstances would have swayed your decision to vote Harris versus third party?
Game theory says none of this bs posturing matters or is relevant at all.
How do your candidates get to 270? If they can’t then you literally helped trump.
Your turn.
I’ve been trying to answer this all day, and struggling to do so. I think it’s because I use living in a deep red state to excuse my decision so that people aren’t allowed to be as mad at me. But I’d also like to think that I’m principled enough to have made the same decision in a swing state, even though that’s not the answer that people want to hear.
My hope was that by outspokenly refusing to vote for Harris unless she pledged to withhold weapons from Israel, if enough people did so, she might actually adopt that stance to earn our vote. Proceeding to then vote for her anyway, despite consistently implying she wouldn’t do anything different than Biden, would have felt… idk the right word- hypocritical?
I get shat on for putting principles above practicality but, if everyone did that, we might live in a much better world. Though I’ve heard pragmatists say the exact opposite about idealists.
Voting at all is already an activity that is incongruent with my values, as it legitimizes a system that I believe in dismantling.
I guess to answer your question, I probably would’ve voted for Harris if she pledged to withhold weapons from Israel, or, if in a swing state, if I happened to be temporarily convinced of the utilitarian perspective, but it would probably have to be within like an hour of voting, and be disgusted with myself after
It sounds like you had similar hopes with me and other Harris voters. It does stand to fact that you did do something more significant than a big number of 2020 blue voters by actually showing up to the booth. It also sounds like the emotional or symbolic nature of your vote has a higher value for you than for some people.
I do apologize that my questioning was causing some distress or time loss. With that in mind feel free to ignore my follow-up query:
- Was 2024 the first time you voted 3rd party or protested the D-R binary?
- At what point in time did you decide you were going to protest/third party vote (and if there was a “trigger moment,” that would be enlightening)?
- How long has Gaza/apartheid Israel been in, say, your top three concerns when voting (decades, years, months…)?
